Waga yado no hitomura susuki urawakami musubi toki ni wa madashikarikeri

English Translation

The clump of pampas
in my garden — the tips of
it are still too green
and the time for tying them
together has not yet come

Meaning

The clump of pampas grass in my garden is still too green at the tips; the time for tying it has not yet come.

Commentary

125 The Bridge of Magpies

The Izumi Commander called at the residence of Fujiwara no Tokihira, Minister of the Left. He had been drinking elsewhere and was tipsy, and the visit came unlooked for, late at night. The minister, taken by surprise, said he wondered where the commander could have been going, and had the doors thrown noisily open; and Mibu no Tadamine, attending on him, knelt at the foot of the steps with a pine torch and offered "Kasasagi no wataseru hashi no shimo no ue o yowa ni fumiwake koto sara ni koso" by way of greeting. The master of the house found this admirable, and they drank and made music the whole night through; he gave gifts to the commander and a reward to Tadamine as well. This Tadamine had a daughter, and when a man asked for her in marriage he answered that it was an excellent proposal; but when the man wrote to ask when the match might go forward, Tadamine replied with "Waga yado no hitomura susuki urawakami musubi toki ni wa madashikarikeri". She was in truth still a very small girl. That is the whole of the section.
The Izumi Commander is Fujiwara no Sadakuni, elder brother of Sadakata, the Minister of the Right of Sanjō, who appears in the twenty-ninth, seventy-first and ninety-first sections. Mibu no Tadamine was one of the compilers of the Kokin-shū. Fujiwara no Tokihira rose to Minister of the Left, appears in the fourteenth section as the husband of the Lady of the North at Hon'in, and is named in the hundred and twenty-fourth.
The setting is Tadamine's house, where a proposal for his daughter was under discussion.
What prompted the poem was the suitor's asking when the match might go forward. It is his reply.
The prose concludes that she was in truth still a very small girl, and the section closes on that sentence.

The clump of pampas grass in his garden is the daughter.
The word in the third line means the tip of a plant, with a grammar of cause: because the tips are young. The same sound carries the word for being young in years.
Tying the grass is both an actual practice with pampas heads and the tying of a marriage bond.
The closing says the time has not yet come. It is a refusal, and it declines nothing — it only says the season is early. Where the earlier poem made an occasion out of an improvised greeting, this one takes the sting out of a refusal; the same man's poems do two different kinds of work in one section.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

Other